Submitted by Tom Peters on February 5, 2008 - 10:23am
 We all have our pet industries, those quirky little eddies in our massively flowing economy (although it's not flowing well at the moment) that for some reason we love to watch and ponder. For example, in the Eighties I became interested in the pork bellies market. Maybe it was my Iowa upbringing, although I never lived on a farm and slopped any hogs. Several times a week I would check in on pork bellies futures -- the old fashioned way, in a printed newspaper, as I trudged barefoot six miles through a raging blizzard to class. Truth to tell, at the time I was in graduate school and working part-time at a restaurant-bar, so I never actually invested any money in pork bellies, but for some reason pork bellies captured and held my attention for awhile. Read More »
Submitted by Tom Peters on October 26, 2006 - 2:04am
Last Sunday I traveled out to California to attend the Internet Librarian Conference—ITI's tenth, my first. I managed to fly to San Jose with nary a directional question, then took a shuttle bus past fields of artichokes and garlic, and dry brown hills mad in the October sun, down to Monterey on the coast.
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Submitted by Tom Peters on September 13, 2006 - 5:55pm
Despite or because of its runaway success, the iPod/iTunes service from Apple has more than a few critics and enemies. Some musicians and music companies don't like the strategy of ninety-nine-cent pricing. It smacks of the cheesy dollar-store marketing mindset. I agree with the heat-wave gripes about Apple that Karen Schneider posted to this blog in July, and I can add a few more rants of my own.
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Submitted by Tom Peters on July 26, 2006 - 10:39am
Two news items that scurried across my attention in July have led me to conclude that, in this era of overlapping eras, we have entered yet another age.
The first item was an industry report that Apple shipped more than eight million iPod devices in the second quarter of 2006. That's almost three million per month or 100,000 per day, and the second quarter is not a big gift-giving quarter, unless Apple packaged all those iPods in large plastic Easter eggs. (Remember, you read it here first.)
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Submitted by Tom Peters on July 17, 2006 - 2:37pm
It's already mid-July and I'm still thinking about the programs, news, and events from the ALA Annual Conference in New Orleans three weeks ago. This means either that it was an unusually important conference, or that I'm slow on the uptake and/or have serious conference closure issues.
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Submitted by Tom Peters on January 26, 2006 - 5:00pm
 Recently Apple, Inc., announced that it will allow colleges and universities to use a special sector within the overall iTunes service to load and distribute course lectures, other course content, and related digital audio and video files. The Cupertino, California-based company calls its new service " iTunes U."
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Submitted by Tom Peters on November 28, 2005 - 11:32am
December is almost here, which means that the calendar year as we know it is drawing to a close. This will unleash the urge—and the annual ritual of the popular press—to write reflective articles about the year just finishing and predictive articles about 2006. The top events in politics, the arts, athletics, and other areas will be rehashed and ranked. I predict that natural disasters will receive a lot more attention and ink than they have in the retrospectives of previous years.
Rather than look back on 2005, let's look forward to 2006. To get a jump on the competition, I'm going to stick my neck out and speculate a bit about what could be major developments in library and information technology in the coming year. I have two things in mind: Both technologies have been around for awhile, but 2006 could be the breakout year for both.
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